Monday, June 15, 2009

Saturday evening at 11:09pm a customer of mine emailed and asked if I could shoot a basketball camp at Comcast Center the following morning at 9:30am. A Sunday morning basketball camp on campus? I thought it had to be a mistake...

But sure enough it wasn't and the Terps were hosting a summer camp in Comcast Center for some high school players from around the region. To my surprise many of the varsity squad were playing, referee'ing, or coaching. Even the coaching staff was on hand (including Coach Williams) to observe the players and offer advice.

I focused on a handful of players and got the shots we needed. It was enjoyable being back inside Comcast and seeing the team scrimmage. On the way out I had to catch myself though - I instinctively went to bundle up before heading out the freight-door of Comcast. My Pavlonian instinct was that the outside temperature would be freezing due to the cold weather that is common during basketball season. It was quite a shell shock stepping out into a sunny summer mid-80s environment!

It's been awhile since I posted. But hopefully I'm back for awhile. My responsibilities increased a lot in the late Spring and I couldn't find the time to maintain my blog as religiously as in the past. But now that summer is here I believe I'll have a better shot at regularly updating my blog.

That being said...

On Saturday I shot a Freedom game down at RFK. My new Garmin Nuvi 760 routed me around a traffic jam on the BW Parkway and took me through Washington DC to avoid the delay. I made it to the venue with a few minutes to spare and headed to the field to assemble my gear.

Fortunately the weather played along with the game. Despite showers all week Saturday was sunny and spectacular. There was plenty of light on the field!

I shot the first half with the sun over my back and focused on the Freedom defense in the near side of the field. Towards the end of the first half I walked over to the far side of the field and shot into the sun. I like the halo effect you can get when you shoot directly into the sun. I got a nice shot of a player with some sweat coming off her brow after she headed a corner kick. It would've been better if I had caught her eyes. But oh well...

Earlier this week I reorganized my Lightroom Catalog. I have over 35k files in the original catalog Lightroom created when I first ran it less than a year ago. When I switched from Aperture to Lightroom I noticed a remarkable speedup. However, it's been running slower and slower as I cram more and more files into it. After doing some research I decided to split out my images into separate catalogs.

Of the 35k files in my catalog 30k are in the "Maryland Terrapins" folder. I split those off and made a separate catalog for the Terps. I then partitioned my remaining 5k files into a Personal catalog (family, friends, work, etc) and Projects catalog (night life, professional teams, etc). The key to this was asking Lightroom to avoid placing DNG copies in the catalog as well as to skip thumbnail creation/copying.

While my "Maryland Terrapins" catalog is still large and slow my other catalogs move along a lot faster. I've given some thought about how to carve up the "Maryland Terrapins" catalog but I haven't come to any conclusions yet. A logical choice would be to demarcate my Terrapins catalog based on sport or based on time frame (e.g. FY2008). However, the down side with that approach is that I couldn't easily cut across sports or produce a full dump of all my published Terrapin imagery. So it's still up in the air. I have some time until Fall semester sports begin in earnest so I'll probably come up with something between now and then.